Theodore Decker: The white-knuckle horror scenes on a snowy drive to work

Monday

Jan 8, 2018 at 9:06 PM

Theodore Decker The Columbus Dispatch @Theodore_Decker

My westward commute starts to go south when a muster of penguins waddles past at twice my speed. I'm certain one of them flips me the bird.

Penguins are jerks. Just ask Batman.

A wise person would have turned back long before this, having seen the folly of attempting this 14-mile commute. A wise person would have heeded the Ohio Department of Transportation freeway signs, on which flashing travel times have been replaced with "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

I tell myself I am prepared. For starters, I am sitting behind the wheel of my Dispatch StormTeam Mobile Weather Emergency Prediction Command Center, also known as my car.

I ease the command center down my driveway with caution, since the last time the city plowed or salted my neighborhood streets was never.

Despite this lack of personal contact with snow removal equipment, I feel that I have been briefed sufficiently by television newscasters about how to behave around a plow, should I come across one in the wild.

The gist of the advice appears to be that I treat a plow as I would a mother grizzly bear. Take it slow, avoid surprises and give it plenty of room. Don't crowd the plow/sow.

This advice is easy to follow because, as usual, I don't see any plows. Steeling my nerves before leaving my neighborhood, I revisit the city's Warrior Watch website, which indicates that the eight plows currently deployed are far enough from me to be of no concern. The warrior map suggests they are lumbering around berry patches on the North and West sides.

I also check the television news stories online. "On top of the ice, literally, snow has fallen across central Ohio with light accumulations — around an inch or so, mainly up north," one story reads.

Faced with a sentence like that, I begin to shiver.

But there is no turning back now, I realize, as I dodge smoldering hunks of Kia.

Here and there, the guardrails and wires on Interstate 70 twist and tilt, as though Godzilla shuffled across the freeway this morning on his way to demolish some city. "Godzilla, pick up your feet!" his parents would shout when he was just a young prehistoric sea monster still mutating from errant radiation.

East of Hamilton Road, I see that Mario Andretti has spun out. He is standing on the shoulder, kicking the tire of his disabled Indy car. His wavy gray hair is slick from the sleet.

On the other side of the freeway, things look even worse. A woolly mammoth skids, panics and overturns. He flails his trunk, kicks his legs in an effort to right himself and bellows. Then he ceases thrashing and resigns himself to wait for a tow.

I grimace and fix my gaze straight ahead.

At the ramp to Downtown, deranged, stranded motorists lunge at my tires with sharpened icicles yanked from their gutters. I press on.

My phone chortles. A major breaking news alert advises that Justin Timberlake is coming to Columbus in May.

"The outdoors is the inspiration for a lot of these songs," he says in an announcement as my mobile command center pirouettes up North 4th Street at six revolutions per second. "That's the main idea. The tour will be able to bring the outside in."